Read this alongside national daydream, published over on enlightened housewife, my dedicated poetry blog.
*
We make room for worlds we cannot see. We make room despite their beginnings being bare and flat — alive only in words. Yet we build upon them and gather others to help; believing them to life.
There’s a miniature doorway I spotted yesterday, on a stump in someone’s front garden. Now it’s been planted in my mind – a new flag rippling in conquered ground – I’ll no longer be able to walk past without looking. Checking to see if it’s ever ajar.
I start to build a world for the door.
It belongs to a hedgehog, and each Thursday he invites his friends for an early tea.
Here they come now.
Shrews on their hind legs, with tartan bags and feather scarves. Waddling bats all smart in their bow-ties. Toads with cygnet rings as bracelets on each leg. Some days even the mole makes an appearance, having remembered which tunnel to take.
...and so on.
We make room for others. Room for their worlds built from different words. Eventually, we pick the world we like the best and we tell those we love – those who listen – what we do in ours.
The seeds we plant. The way we move.
Our sounds and patterns.
This world we chose – our reality – simply becomes the imagination we can’t keep to ourselves any longer.
As quickly as Hedgehog and his friends sit down for their feast of worms and glistening berries, as easily as they sip from acorn cups, so too a new world may be born.
A flurry of conversations to magic a nothing into existence.
Ta-da!
The animals set off back to their homes and hidey holes, holding their wobbling bellies. The hedgehog dozes off in his armchair.
*
Lately, I’m beginning to feel there’s little room left for any more newness — seeing as we all have so many worlds within worlds to tend to. Yet each dawn, another reality arrives and our worlds splinter again. Seemingly farther and farther apart. What’s more: the one we’ve chosen to cherish grows ever more delicate. Stormy notions manifest into action overnight and we wake to news of fear and brutality. Stupidity, tragedy.
Can we make room – between all the effort we throw into our own realities – for the world we already have?
Can we make room because, somewhen, peace may prevail?
Is it as easy to make room for hope as it is to conjure a hedgehog with a saucepan of custard?
I’d like to try.
So I’ll try.
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